Based on Tracy Letts’ play, “Killer Joe” is lurid, jazzy and profane. It also strains a little too hard to shock us, as in the line, “I shoved her up against the refrigerator — she stole two ounces of coke from me,” in which the speaker is a young man and the “her” is his aforementioned about-to-be-killed mama.

Director William Friedkin’s wisest decision in making “Killer Joe” is to trust the pulpy material to do its job, which means the story is garish, but the telling of it is not. The characters yell a lot, but the movie never feels like it’s yelling at us. While the Smith family members scheme, do lines of cocaine, parade around toplessly and perform what could be called drumstickellatio, Friedkin keeps his compositions elegant and classically balanced. The effect is to trap us in the eye of a storm, waiting for all hell to break loose.

It seems likely it will break loose from the title character, a lawman freelancing as a hit man who is beautifully played by, I kid you not, Matthew McConaughey. The pretty-boy leer he routinely unfurled in his ’90s and ’00s movies is nowhere to be seen in his intense but creepily calm Joe. McConaughey’s character is discussed long before he’s seen — you can even hear the sound of his cigarette lighter as early as the film’s opening credits — so our expectations are raised that, when we finally meet him, Joe will be uniquely wicked, and McConaughey’s performance delivers on that promise.

Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon, Thomas Hayden Church and Juno Temple play the various-shades-of-nasty Texas family that unwittingly lets Joe into their lives to wreak havoc. Their relationship with him peaks at a twisted parody of a family dinner that wrings dark comedy out of the characters over- or under-reacting to all the horrible things that are happening around them.

That dinner may mean Letts is trying to say something about the rotten core of the American family, but by then, the film is drowning in so much depraved gunk that subtleties are lost. The payoff is dandy anyway, though, because dinner is presided over by Joe, who remains supremely confident that the Smiths will do everything he tells them to and who is correct, at least until the film’s killer final line suggests his domination may be short-lived.

Chris Hewitt was the Pioneer Press movie critic and then an arts and entertainment reporter from 1993 to 2017.

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